Anna Komnene died on 15 January 1148, likely at the monastery of Kecharitomene in Constantinople, where she had lived after her failed political conspiracy.
Anna Komnene died on 15 January 1148, at approximately 65 years of age, most likely within the monastery of Kecharitomene in Constantinople, the convent her mother Irene Doukaina had founded and to which Anna had retreated decades earlier following a failed attempt to seize the throne for her husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, after her father's death in 1118.
Her final years were spent largely in seclusion, and it was during this period of political exile from court life that she composed her masterwork, the Alexiad, a fifteen-book history of her father Emperor Alexios I Komnenos's reign written in Attic Greek and modeled on classical historiography, including Thucydides and Homer. The work remains an indispensable primary source for the First Crusade, the Byzantine-Norman wars, and Komnenian court life, and it stands as one of the only substantial historical narratives authored by a woman in the medieval period.
Anna's death marked the end of a life that bridged the roles of princess, would-be empress, political conspirator, and pioneering scholar. Her legacy endured for centuries through the survival and transmission of the Alexiad manuscript tradition, which later scholars and Byzantinists have used extensively; she is often celebrated today as the first known Western female historian and a foundational figure in the historiography of the Crusades.